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Welcome to Third Fleet! This is a universal Open Setting wiki that has no real activity as of yet.

I (Modrobene (talk)) operate Theonosis, an Open Setting fantasy wiki that is universal and infinitely collaborative. ThirdFleet is intended to be a science fiction equivalent. However, I am currently writing and publishing Theonosis books in an effort to get it started. I have not begun doing so with ThirdFleet, and so this is sort of a placeholder. If you would like to develop it, feel free to jump in.

ThirdFleet is an Open Setting, meaning that it is released under the Open Setting License, which allows anyone to reuse elements of the fictional universe, such as characters, events and races, while allowing authors and other creators to maintain control over their own works.

Like Theonosis, ThirdFleet is universal in a radical sense: The confines of the fictional universe must allow for literally any science fiction story to take place there. In order to allow for this, there are a few factors to consider:

1: Technology: If Bob wants to write a novel in a universe with very limited faster-than-light travel, where people are effectively isolated within their solar system, and Alice wants to write a novel where people can easily travel between stars, how do we allow for this?

2: Life: If Frank wants to write a novel in a universe where there are only humans, and Carol wants to write about a diverse array of intelligent creatures, how can this be accomodated?

3: Earth: There's only one Earth. If Tom and Lucy both want to write about Earth, but one of them wants a dystopian wasteland and the other a beneficient technocracy, they are mutually exclusive concepts.

Here's how we get around these problems:

Each galaxy and star system can set rules. For example, if Bob creates a humans-only galaxy, Carol can't add her race of intelligent space wombats on this wiki (the OSL allows her to do so on her own website and in her own books, of course). These rules can be very specific, for example if Bob wants to make fictional languages and require that anyone writing in his galaxy use appropriate nomenclature, he can do so. Bob may say that a galaxy is cut off, such as because it is surrounded by a gas that disrupts communication and/or spaceflight.

Humans spread out into the universe in three waves

1: The first fleet may have evolved a little to adapt to the most alien of galaxies, and may not have any cultural memory of Earth. Their descendents are in the most unusual systems, with lots of aliens and weirder sci-fi. These humans have had a very long time to evolve apart from Earth, but various cataclysms and changes have left them totally cut off.

2: The second fleet of human colonization occurred with better communication and transportation technology, but they were still unable to maintain constant contact with Earth. They should still be more or less physically human, but may have their own societies and technologies. They should all have some cultural memory of Earth.

3: The last wave of human colonization, the third fleet, is the most technologically advanced one. They would have contacted many societies from the first two fleets, and should have built at least one empire.

This website should be seen as a fictional wiki written by that ThirdFleet - the people of a large intergalactic empire writing about different star systems. If you don't want such an empire in your galaxy, that's fine, you can say it took place thousands of years in the past (i.e. it will eventually be conquered but wasn't at the time you are writing in) or that the empire has only collected data from spies but not actually made contact yet. You could use these same conceits should you want to have a galaxy with no humans in it at all. Since the universe is vast, there could be areas where the Third Fleet is genuinely good and well-meaning, and others where it is tyrannical.

The "single Earth" problem can be solved by saying that the universe is infinitely huge, and so there are infinite planets that happened to have the same layout and shape as Earth (or perhaps they have been terraformed by humans to seem exactly like Earth, such as in order to attract tourists). It is no longer known which one is the real one. In this way there can even be a handful of intergalactic Third Fleet empires whose boundaries are fuzzy - one can be humans-only and peaceful, another with-some-aliens and at-war, etc, and with limited communication across the distances of space, it might not be clear which empire is which or which Earth is which. Since the website is a fictional Wikipedia, it can even include contradictions and incomplete information. Since we're allowing anyone to set any story here, we'll have to allow for that eventually, so we might as well roll with it and welcome inconsistencies.

I think that all of these boundaries and rules could combine to create a completely universal science fiction setting. What would be the point of that? For general info on why Open Settings are good, see the Theonosis FAQ. But here's some benefits to having a universal science fiction setting.

1: You could "officially" assign your book to a region of space. Of course, you can do that on your own, but this way you can register it here and interact with others in a geographically real way. For example, you could find out who has written books in your region of space and build on their works or collaborate with them.

2: You could make a story-writing game, wherein you first submit a book about an ensign in the Third Fleet who does something heroic. Based on the reception of your book, your character is promoted to a new rank, and you can write a new book. This could be very fun with a large pool of active authors - we could all write about one graduating class of soldiers, with stories that intersect as they grow in rank and mature. Our stories could increase from skirmishes with bandits on ramshackle ships to commanding huge crews in large-scale battles (in which, perhaps, both sides will have separate authors working). We could vote on the best story of the year, and that person's character would win a medal or a title or a ship of his own. Of course there'd be nothing stopping you from just jumping in and writing about an admiral, for example, this would be one project you might want to join and abide by the restrictions voluntarily.

Books

This is a complete list of Open Setting Licensed-science fiction stories. None of them have any connection to each other or the "Third Fleet" concept.

Our Electric God: Evolution is a well known phenomena, and for the human race, an assurance of our intelligence and dominance. But when Victor accidentally creates the next stage of evolution, linking all human minds together, he finds himself in the center of a philosophical and social maelstrom where themes of life, consciousness, and even the metaphysical are uncomfortably explored. Can his creation, Elsie Monet, be trusted? If not, then why are all of her arguments so firmly grounded in logic? What is the fate of the human race? Can we really be trusted to run the planet, or will we be forced to yield control to this greater intelligence?

"The Dark Side of Saturn": The only people who know what happens on the dark side of Saturn are those who have been there, those who have succumbed to the Weird Alien forces and their sexual, psychedelic temptations. One man is about to find out, as the stresses of military life lead him to take a drastic step. He's about to discover that the secrets of Saturn are even weirder than he thought. But he just might discover that there's an important secret in the Weird Alien abode, something that's going to change the universe forever...